by John Barnes
Aimeric looked around, smiled broadly, and said, "Your work, Bruce?"
Bruce stammered and blushed, but admitted it was. I could well understand his embarrassment Bieris clapped her hands, applauding him, and said, "It's wonderful! You've got such an interesting eye—I never would have thought you could do so much with simple geometrics."
I thought she was overdoing it.
She turned toward Aimeric and, only half-joking, demanded, "Why didn't you say your friend was this kind of an architect?"
Bruce turned deep purple, but I don't think he was displeased. I realized, with shock, that she meant it, and looked around again, trying to see what my friends saw in those barren, square lines.
We had come here from the height of Nou Occitan's Second Baroque Revival, with its innumerable spires, complex suspended fabrics, and convoluted tiny detail, what one critic called "the gaudy webs of mad romantic half-spider half-elves." These bold clean lines were a shock, and not anything that any Occitan would ever have come up with. I still couldn't see what everyone else obviously did. I consoled myself by thinking that I simply preferred things warm and human, but it seemed a pretty weak rejoinder to Bieris's lightfooted dance from wall to wall and window to window, catching the way the light played on the gently curved surfaces.
When we finally got back to Brace's place, Second Sunset was almost on us and it was distinctly cold. I looked around, saw the first bright stars lighting in the amazing blue depths of Nansen's sky, tasted the clear tongue-spiking air, and felt the cold all around me stretching out from the edges of this warm basin, hardly broken all the way to the meter-thick blankets of frozen CO2 that lay on the ice at the poles. The others went inside, but I lingered a bit longer, watching the last pink flares above the mountains west of us.
Nansen's moon rose then, over the mountains to the west opposite Sodom Gap, blazingly bright and perceptibly warm. With a period a bit under ten hours, it swept perceptibly though slowly up the sky, waxing as it rose, the ground brightening and shadows deepening as they crept along the ground, as if sucked into their sources. Supposedly in the next few thousand years they would have to shove it back outward; if you look closely, you could see a tiny flicker in the dark part, where the huge artificial volcano was providing the thrust It gave me a marvelous idea for a song, and I went inside to work on it.
As I was sitting practicing with my lute, the Council of Rationalizers commed us. We would first meet with them three days from now to discuss what we could do for them; at that time, we would also be expected to go by the Work Assignment Bureau in Utilitopia and choose our permanent work Till then we could work at Brace's as farmhands.
We napped for part of First Dark—most people took a two-or three-hour nap then, and slept through Second Dark—and ate a large midday meal. It was still a while before the sun would come up for Light, and too cold to take the walk I was starting to look forward to, so I spent a lot of time at the reader trying to find out what anyone did for amusement. At first I looked for entertainment reviews, but finding none, I started looking through the general com listings.
There were some music instructors, but no musicians. No art galleries or theaters. I had a brief moment of encouragement when I noticed a category for "Instructors in Literature," but as far as I could tell those were tutors for college students. Sure enough, there were also "Instructors in Mathematics."
There seemed to be no competitive sports, and there were fewer cafes, taverns, and restaurants in all of the huge city of Utilitopia than there had been in my little hometown of Elinorien. There were no dojos, but there were sizable numbers of "Spa-noun comf-adj-mod-spa pro-studia-adv-mod-comf" in the student neighborhoods surrounding the University. At first I had thought they might be the local equivalent of hangouts, because the "SCS" abbreviation didn't give it away and I could not read Reason. When I checked I found they were giant study halls.
I could have named twenty professional poets in Elinorien, and it would have taken me a long time to count all the people who played and sang for a living in the few blocks of Noupeitau's Quartier des Jovents where I had been living. I had always assumed that everywhere else was something like Nou Occitan, solving the problem of the fully automatic economy by employing everyone at some interesting occupation. Obviously this place had other solutions. There were more than 170,000 entries for "General physical labor," almost all of them contractors who presumably hired other people to do the actual labor.
It occurred to me that I had left so abruptly that I had not even told Marcabru about what had happened or where I was going. I dashed off a quick note to him, emphasizing the romantic qualities of leaping to another world, and adding a paragraph about Caledony as the "culture-free culture."
I spent the afternoon of Second Light wandering around with the lute, stole a couple more apples, and worked on getting used to rectangular scenery. As the sun sank opposite the Optimals—I had learned by then that the more distant range had no name because no one ever went there, but the local joke was that they were the "Pessimals"—I had the beginnings of a couple of songs and had even begun to get fairly well used to the way the land looked. Give it a decade and I might be ready to believe there was a difference between "attractive" and "unattractive" cultivation; I had to admit some stone walls and meandering streams had a certain crude charm. By the time I got back to the house for evening meal and rest, Second Dark was coming on fast. I slept remarkably well, and awoke with the guilty feeling that I had not thought of Garsenda at all.
TWO
The next day we drew our temporary work assignments. Aimeric and Bruce were to pick apples again; Bieris was to take a little electric cart around and leave supplementary food out for Brace's herds of the local sheep-goat cross.
And I was to shovel out Brace's dairy barn.
The obnoxious aintellect cheerfully noted that it was estimated to be a twelve-hour project, so I could put all three of my remaining shifts as a farmhand into it.
After my first four hours as a shovel propulsion unit, I was stiff and groaning. Moreover, I had not really noticed before that the gravity was a bit over eight percent more than what it was on Wilson—but now, with every three-kilo shovelload weighting a quarter of a kilo more, and every thirty-kilo wheelbarrow weighing 32.4, by the end of my shift I felt every dragging extra gram. It took me some hours to get used to the new relationship between inertia and weight, as well, so that for the first hour I was accidentally flinging shovelloads against the wall, where they splashed back onto my clothing, and then for the next hour I was dropping them short, where they coated my boots.
I wrote two more letters to Marcabru—one about the quaint revival of the archaic custom of forced labor, and one that discussed my discovery that in the past fifty years, the eighteen million inhabitants of Caledony had produced nineteen novels, about one thousand pieces of secular music (all instrumental solos for some reason I couldn't fathom), and 262 human-designed public buildings, thirteen of them by Bruce. Having looked at the photos of all of them, I had furthermore been forced to the conclusion that he was indeed the nearest thing to an architect this culture had yet produced. I then added,
But I am encouraged because in the same period they have produced an estimated seventy-eight million sermons and one hundred thousand hymns. Marcabru, when I return— perhaps with great good luck in the last month of Yseut's reign—I shall be much obliged if you will follow me around for three straight days endlessly repeating "Now don't do anything stupid." That is, assuming I can walk after spending all the time shoveling manure; from the feel of my shoulders, I shall be the ideal Rigoletto. Bruce assures me that soon I won't feel it.
Bruce lied. I was still stiff when we were setting out for Utilitopia two days later. Maybe in atonement, he had offered to teach me to drive the cat. I had jumped at the chance.
Now, as we sat down at the controls together, he said, "These barges are complicated and tricky to work. Are you sure you want to learn?"
"Any
thing not to be moving that stuff around."
"Ha," Aimeric said, settling comfortably into the back. "You're an administrative assistant to a government economist. You have not yet begun to move it around."
"Anyone who can't see the difference between the literal and the figurative has never done the literal." At Brace's direction, I pulled the lift switch, and the cat rose a couple of centimeters as the maglevs pushed out the treads.
"Actually I have done the literal—the whole time I was a teenager, at a feedlot in Utilitopia. My father thought it might help the career in politics he had planned for me. There's some prestige value in having done a really grubby job. God, I hated him."
"Is he still umm—" Bieris began.
"Yap. In fact he's the Chairman of the Council of Rationalizers," Aimeric said. "Kind of the same job as PM back home."
Bruce finished system checks. As the last wave of green rolled through the holographic cube in front of him, he said, "Did you call him last night, Aimeric?"
"He knows where I am. And who. He can call me. If he wants to."
Bruce seemed not to hear the non-answer, turning to me to say, "Now just remember, right foot is throttle, left foot is brake, right joystick angles right treads, left angles left, button on top of the left stick locks the tread angles together, button on the right locks them together toed-in half a degree. Double tap the throttle to set an isospeed, triple tap for isoload, then take your foot off it till you need to control directly or reset—you've got the throttle back as soon as your foot touches it. And don't worry! You've got twenty-five kilometers before there's anything near enough to the road to run into or fall off of. Keep treads parallel on levels, splay for uphill, snowplow coming down—or for a very fast stop."
I started with a lurch, but no one commented. I thought maybe Aimeric would talk more about his father, but he stayed silent, and clipping along at just over 150 km/hr, I was busy doing what Bruce told me to. By the time I gained any idea of what I was doing, we were halfway up Sodom Gap, and the scenery was so spectacular that conversation was reserved for exclaiming over it—not that I saw much other than the road on that trip. A half hour later we topped the Gap and headed from there down the Gouge in the winding journey into Utilitopia.
The Council of Rationalizers met in a small room with no Windows or decoration. There was a large interactive screen up front and a small terminal at each of the fifty or so seats. My chair seemed to be deliberately a little uncomfortable, either digging into my back or pressing my thighs annoyingly. The dingy colors suggested that the room ought to have a nasty sour smell to it, but it had only the faint, sterile scent of soap, disinfectant, and hard cold surfaces.
They began with a prayer that sounded like a contract. "Our Father, acknowledging that it is only reasonable that... as beings created with the capacity for rationality therefore ... thus assuming ... it follows from the observed portion of Your Law therefore that..." and so forth, winding down eventually to "... for it is demonstrable that no person in the sense-accessible realm is, or can be, or ever can have been, in any statable way, greater than You."
They ran through some routine business, ratifying a wide range of price changes (plainly, market here did not have anything to do with "market forces") and an interminable set of reports demonstrating, I think, that they had gotten immorality down to the lowest possible level.
Finally, they came to New Business, which was us. They were visibly uncomfortable about Aimeric's insistence on his Occitan name, but they sat politely while he made graphs spin and leap on the screen for them. I had settled on a position in which the chair slowly ate my coccyx and my thighs gradually creased, but neither happened too quickly.
A three-hour debate followed, none of which I could follow and all of which I had to appear to be following with intense interest. After a lot of arguments that were, I think, about principle versus expediency, they decided that maybe the markets they had now would not be able to handle the adjustments all by themselves, and appointed Aimeric, Bieris, and me to be advisors to the Pastor for Market Function. I realized at once that since the Pastor for Market Function was a dumpy-looking woman named Clarity Peterborough, the job was obviously ceremonial. We were told our job would be to assist her in drawing up proposals for dealing with the expected changes.
As the meeting broke up, Chairman Carruthers said he wanted to talk with us and with the Pastor for Market Function, so we stuck around. No one bothered to speak with any of us before they left, but they didn't speak with each other either—they just stood up and walked out after the closing prayer—so I didn't feel particularly insulted.
When they had gone, Aimeric turned to his father and said, "It's a pleasure to see you looking so well, sir. I hope this will work out to our mutual benefit."
Old Carruthers's head bounced once, hard. "I appreciate your courtesy. We have much business to do. Have you been pleased with your new life?"
"Yes, quite." Aimeric's voice, utterly expressionless, sounded as if he had spent years developing this tone.
Carruthers never looked at him. He said, very softly, almost inaudibly, "Then no doubt your decision to emigrate must have been based on a strong rational grasp of the intangible factors in the situation. You have my congratulations."
"I appreciate that very much."
It was like watching people make love by semaphore.
The two of them bowed, deeply and formally. Aimeric showed a very slight trace of a grin, or perhaps it was just tension.
Then, just as if nothing at all had happened—and still without touching the son he had not seen in a quarter of a century—the old Chairman got down to business.
"Sit, everyone. Now that we're out of that silly meeting we can dispense with ceremony. Aimeric—am I pronouncing that correctly? accent on the first syllable? good—I believe you met the Highly Reverend Clarity Peterborough while you were here."
We all bowed, since that seemed to be the local custom. "Highly Reverend" sounded like a real title, and now that I thought of it half the Council of Rationalizers had been female—in fact I'd thought at first they had all brought their wives, but the women were clearly voting. I was still a bit shocked to find a woman in a job that no Occitan woman would have stooped to, but I obviously needed to get used to local customs, so I tried to look at her with calm neutrality.
Clarity Peterborough was a slim woman, short, perhaps forty years old, who blinked constantly, as if her eyes were sensitive to the light. Like most of the more religious Caledons, her hair was cut close to her head, but she had gone some time between haircuts, and it was not long enough to stay combed. The preswelds on her shirt and coverall seemed to pull a little in some places and sag in others, making odd wrinkles, as if they had been made to slightly wrong measurements or she had worn them more times than they were designed for.
She looked at each of us as if memorizing our faces and names and studying us the way a butterfly collector does a rare, highly prized specimen. "My," she said, "you're all so colorful to look at. It will delight people to see you."
We all blushed; Bieris thanked her.
I thought I detected a raised eyebrow of amusement on the Chairman, but at the time I didn't know him well enough to be sure. Did Caledons spend all their time trying to guess at each others' feelings?
"Let me make sure I'm pronouncing everyone correctly," the Chairman said. "Bieris and Grott?"
Pretty close, really. "Giraut," I said. "Short i between the g and the r, au dipthong like in Industrial Age German or Classical Latin."
He nodded. "Giraut," he said, getting it perfectly. "I hope you'll excuse my accent—I read several languages but I can only speak Terstad and Reason without embarrassing myself."
A flunky brought in large mugs of hot, slightly salty water, with a citrulo slice floating in each one. Bruce and Aimeric had coached us enough to know that we were to wait until Carruthers drank, then finish our mugs with him, in three long draughts with prayers in between. It had
seemed a silly ritual, but no sillier them any other, as we learned it, but now I noticed that the warm liquid felt very pleasant on the throat and seemed to take a lot of the chill off. I wondered how anything so pleasant had survived in this culture.
Carruthers sighed a little and said, "Let me start out by stating the problem back to you, to see if I really do understand it. I think I speak as an unusually consistent and reasonable thinker on such subjects, with my many years of experience in the mathematics of both correct politics and correct theology. Even if you are not able to apprehend my logic immediately, I do hope that you will be able to recognize the validity of my emotions."
I couldn't decide whether he was insulting us or confessing to a personal failing.
He went on. "I don't think any of us here really wanted the springer to come into existence. In our isolation from the rest of the Thousand Cultures, we've enjoyed several centuries to develop a fully rationalized world. But we are by no means finished. As far as I can see, connection can only set the cause of Rational Christianity back. It was simply our decision that connection must come, sooner or later, and that if it came later, the situation would only be worse—hence the decision to face it immediately. And I might add that many prominent citizens opposed that decision all the same."
I squirmed on my seat—the damned thing was hurting me again—and noticed others, even Carruthers, doing the same thing.
"It seems to me," Carruthers said, "that my first concern has to be with this supposed 'assistance through the Transition Period' that the Council of Humanity is supplying us with. You may propose a solution or an internal policy that we may not wish to follow. Are we free to say no?"
Aimeric thought about this quietly for a moment and then said, "My mission is only to provide advice and technical assistance in handling the violent dislocations your economy is going to go through. The Council of Humanity has a strong interest in making sure that reintegration of the Thousand Cultures goes smoothly, and therefore they want you to suffer the least possible social pain."